Karl Haushofer
Karl Haushofer869-1946), a German general and later academic, popularized the concept of geopolitics. Although not a member of the Nazi Party, was one of its intellectual sources. Rudolf Hess, one of his students, would soon introduce him to Adolf Hitler, and the biological theory certainly affected Hitler's writings on Lebensraum in Mein Kampf, and possibly the Nazi race and biological ideology in general. [1]
Albert Haushofer, a member of the German Resistance, was his son.
Early and military life
He joined the Imperial German Army in 1887. In 1896, he married Martha Mayer Doss, the daughter of a Jewish merchant from Mannheim.
In 1908 he was sent to Tokyo to study and learn Japanese. He was much influenced by the ideas of Aritomo Yamagata, founder of the Imperial Japanese Army. Based in part on his Japanese studies, received a degree in Geography, Geology and History from the University of Munich in 1913.
During the First World War he served on the Eastern Front in Russia and the Western Front in France. By 1918 he had reached the rank of Major-General and in 1918 supervised the return of the Thirtieth Bavarian Reserve Division from Alsace to Bavaria.
Haushofer and Germany
Haushofer retired from the German Army as a major general, and began teaching at the University of Munich in 1919. His essential core theory was that the state "is a biological organism which grows or contracts, and that in the struggle for space the strong countries take land from the weak." Influencing his thinking were the works of Oswald Spengler, Alexander Humboldt, Karl Ritter, Friedrich Ratzel, and Halford Mackinder. [2]
References
- ↑ Holger H. Herwig, The Daemon of Geopolitics: Karl Haushofer, and Adolf Hitler
- ↑ Karl Haushofer, Spartacus
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